Art as Purposeful Activity

 

Most individuals and societies believe art serves some larger purpose — hence state funding and the prestige of artists. But that purpose becomes difficult to demonstrate, and argument rapidly enters the even more contentious political and psychological arena.

Most societies seek to control art. The means may be overt, through censorship and repression in totalitarian regimes, or the more subtle ways of the western democracies through the artist-critic-outlet chain, school and university curricula, selective public support. To many the control is scarcely evident, just the purchasing power of public taste refracted through beliefs and social presuppositions.

Perhaps that applies to art with a capital "A", fine art. But the distinction between the fine and the practical is a recent development, originating in the Renaissance and finding expression as "aesthetics" with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735. Neither the ancient nor the medieval worlds recognized the difference. Artists were simply craftsmen, producing goods that were useful and pleasing. The end product was obvious, and could be easily appraised. Plato believed that art should convey intellectual insights into reality. Aristotle, on the contrary, accepted art as imitation, provided this imitation brought out the universal character of the experience. The medieval Church employed art to narrate the gospels and celebrate God's glory.

Today we are less happy with such ulterior purposes. We set them aside and insist that art is that which remains when social expectations, patron's instructions, effect of the medium employed, etc. have all been removed. Fine art, we say, serves only itself. Wider issues are no doubt involved — market forces, psychic health, social representation — but such issues should not control art. To view a good book or film exclusively through its social message is to behave as a provincial philistine. Fine art has its own criteria, its terminology and aesthetics, which we must learn if we are to be admitted into the circle of a cultured elite.

Karl Marx argued that all mental systems (ideologies) were the products of social and economic realities. To these realities he ascribed religious beliefs, legal systems and cultural expression. Marx emphasized that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but the other way about. And whereas philosophers have interpreted the world variously, the important need was to change it.

In orchestrating public opinion behind some policy or other, politicians must appeal to emotional stereotypes, simplify positions and present one-sided arguments. Something more relevant to a pluralist society was developed by Stanley Fish. His reader-response approach to literary criticism saw the value of a literary work as the sum total of its individual vales to its readers, i.e. its relevance to them. Such readers varied greatly in their literary and social experience, of course, but Fish argued that the matrix of interpretations was indeed what the text meant: there was no definitive interpretation that could then be extracted and taught.

Is there not something more general, which better reflects the importance of art? Take the Greek, Chinese and Islamic civilizations: their history is for specialists, but we can all admire their painting, architecture, music and literature, if only through the distorting glass of current preoccupations. But could we not say that art should serve something that is fundamental to our natures, which perdures, which gives shape and significance to our lives?

Many art-historians and aestheticians believe so. For if art intended only sensory pleasure or self-expression we should do better to opt for a good meal or convivial evening with friends. But art, argued Tilghman, is about the depth and mystery of life, about relationships, and about conflicts within the human soul. Any theory of art which did not recognize these features would be a mistaken theory.

A much-truncated version of the article on TextEtc.

 

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Purposeful Activity

 

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